Openness

The way of meditation is attention, not concentration. Attention is a way of openness. We just pay attention to what is in front of us and look. We look fully with the whole heart, and the whole body or with the whole being of ourselves. If you look with the whole being, leaving no room, then you can experience whole or complete clarity of looking and the head disappears.  Dhiravamsa

A person is neither a thing nor a process, but an opening or clearing through which the Absolute can manifest.  Martin Heidegger

In his first summers, forsaking all his toys, my son would stand rapt for near an hour in his sandbox in the orchard, as doves and redwings came and went on the warm wind, the leaves dancing, the clouds flying, birdsong and sweet smell of privet and rose. The child was not observing; he was at rest in the very centre of the universe, a part of things, unaware of endings and beginnings, still in unison with the primordial nature of creation, letting all light and phenomena pour through. Ecstasy is identity with all existence, and ecstasy showed in his bright paintings; like the Aurignacian hunter, who became the deer he drew on the cave wall, there was no 'self' to separate him from the bird or flower.  Peter Matthiessen, "The Snow Leopard"

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